Joint health and safety committees, return to work and the year ahead

The earlier lessons dealt with particular hazards. This final lesson looks at the systems that hold a school's safety work together over time: the committee that brings workers and management together, the written program that sets out who does what, the process for helping injured staff return to work, and the yearly cycle of planning and review. It ends with a capstone case in which Willow Park builds its safety plan for the coming year using everything in the course.

The committee

Under the OHSA, a workplace that regularly has 20 or more workers must have a joint health and safety committee (JHSC), and a workplace with 6 to 19 workers must have a health and safety representative. In a school board, this generally means each school with 20 or more staff has its own JHSC, unless the Minister has approved a different arrangement, such as a committee covering several sites. The committee must have at least two members in workplaces with fewer than 50 workers and at least four in larger ones, and at least half the members must be workers who do not exercise managerial functions, selected by the workers or their unions. There are two co-chairs, one from each side. At least one worker member and one management member must be certified, which involves completing approved training. The committee must meet at least once every three months.

Whatever the details, a good school committee does the same core work:

• Inspects the workplace regularly, as described in Lesson 3.
• Hears concerns from staff and brings them to management.
• Reviews injury, near-miss and violence reports, looking for patterns.
• Takes part in investigations of serious incidents.
• Makes recommendations to the employer for improvements.
• Follows up to check that recommendations and repairs have been carried out.
• Keeps staff informed through minutes posted on the health and safety board and short updates at staff meetings.

The committee's power is mainly the power to recommend, but the law backs it up. Under the OHSA, the employer must respond in writing to the committee's written recommendations within 21 days, either with a timetable for carrying them out or with reasons for disagreeing. Certified members also have specific powers, including, in certain dangerous circumstances, the power to direct the employer to stop work.

At Pinecrest Secondary School, Hannah and Marion co-chair the committee. In her first year, Hannah noticed that the committee spent most of each meeting going through the same open items. She introduced a simple tracker: every finding or recommendation has an owner, a target date and a status, and the meeting starts with overdue items only. Meetings became shorter and more focused, and the number of overdue items fell from 31 to 6 over the year.

The written program

The OHSA requires every employer with more than five regularly employed workers to prepare and review at least once a year a written occupational health and safety policy, and to develop and maintain a program to implement it. For a school board, the program usually includes the workplace violence and harassment programs, WHMIS, first aid, inspections, incident reporting and investigation, return to work, training, and procedures for specific hazards such as working alone, heat, asbestos and student transfers. The policy is signed by the director of education and posted in every school.

A written program is only useful if people know it and use it. The test Daniel applies when he visits a school is simple: can a staff member, asked at random, say how to report a hazard, how to summon help in an emergency, where the SDSs are, and who is on the committee? If not, the program exists on paper only.

Return to work

When a staff member is injured, getting them back to work safely and as soon as their recovery allows is good for them and for the school. People who stay connected to work tend to recover better, keep their income and avoid the long-term harm that comes with extended absence. A good return-to-work process is cooperative: the worker, the principal, the board's disability management staff, the worker's health care providers, the union and the WSIB all have parts.

Under Ontario's workplace insurance law, the employer and the worker must cooperate in the worker's early and safe return to work. The employer must contact the worker as soon as possible after the injury, try to provide suitable work that is available and consistent with the worker's functional abilities, and give the WSIB information it asks for. The worker must also contact the employer, take part, and share information about their functional abilities, though not their diagnosis. Employers with 20 or more workers have a duty to re-employ workers who had at least one year of continuous employment before the injury, in many cases. Separately, the Ontario Human Rights Code requires employers to accommodate workers with disabilities, including work-related ones, to the point of undue hardship.

In a school, suitable modified work is often easier to find than people think. A custodian with a shoulder injury might do light cleaning, inventory and supervision of summer students. A teacher recovering from a concussion might start with half days, no yard duty and a quieter classroom. An educational assistant with a back injury might work with students who do not need transfers, or support reading groups. The key is to focus on what the worker can do, review regularly, and increase duties step by step.

The yearly cycle

Safety in a school follows the school year. Daniel encourages every principal to think of it as a cycle:

• August: review last year's incidents and inspection findings, update safety plans for students, check that training is current, and plan orientation for new staff.
• September: orientation for new and returning staff, emergency drills, and a walk-through of the building after summer work.
• October to December: regular inspections, flu season, darker mornings and the start of winter maintenance.
• January to March: winter slips, indoor air in closed-up buildings, and the yearly review of the policy and programs.
• April to June: heat, outdoor activities, field trips, end-of-year moves and chemical clear-outs.
• Throughout: incident reporting, investigation, committee meetings and follow-up.

Capstone: Willow Park's plan for the year

In August, Willow Park's principal sits down with Jenna, Priya, the school's committee members and Daniel to build the safety plan for the coming year. They start from the data. The program below summarizes last year's incidents at Willow Park by cause and ranks the causes by a simple priority score that combines how often they happen with how much time off they cause.

# Rank Willow Park's incident causes by frequency and lost days.
causes = {
    # cause: (number of reports, lost work days)
    "student incidents (resource room)": (19, 41),
    "slips at the front entrance (winter)": (6, 12),
    "lifting and student transfers": (4, 9),
    "student incidents (other classes)": (5, 3),
    "bodily fluid exposures": (3, 0),
    "standing on chairs or desks": (2, 6),
    "office aggression from adults": (2, 0),
}
total_reports = sum(n for n, _ in causes.values())
total_days = sum(d for _, d in causes.values())

def score(n, d):
    # equal weight to share of reports and share of lost days
    return 50 * n / total_reports + 50 * d / total_days

ranked = sorted(causes.items(), key=lambda kv: score(*kv[1]), reverse=True)
for cause, (n, d) in ranked:
    print(f"{score(n, d):5.1f}  {cause:38} {n:2} reports, {d:2} lost days")

 52.0  student incidents (resource room)      19 reports, 41 lost days
 15.8  slips at the front entrance (winter)    6 reports, 12 lost days
 11.2  lifting and student transfers           4 reports,  9 lost days
  8.2  student incidents (other classes)       5 reports,  3 lost days
  6.7  standing on chairs or desks             2 reports,  6 lost days
  3.7  bodily fluid exposures                  3 reports,  0 lost days
  2.4  office aggression from adults           2 reports,  0 lost days

The ranking confirms what everyone at the table already suspected: behaviour incidents in the resource room are the largest problem by far, followed by entrance slips and student transfers. The team agrees on a plan with a small number of actions, each with an owner, a date and a way to check whether it worked.

Two things about the plan are worth noting. First, it is short: six priorities rather than forty, because a plan that tries to do everything does nothing well. Second, the checks include leading indicators, such as plans updated, training completed and reports made, as well as injury numbers, so the team can tell whether the work is being done before the injury numbers change. The committee reviews progress at each meeting and the whole plan at the end of the year, and the cycle begins again.